It’s dead quiet in the neighborhood. Seriously dark outside when I saw car pull to the curb 50 yards away and turn off it’s lights and then flash their headlights twice. Aha! A signal! Drug deal? Illicit sex? Cheating Spouses? Russian spies? Jihadists? Watermelon Progressives?

Seconds later a car darts out of my cul-de-sac. I’m not saying which neighbor it might have been even though I recognize the vehicle. It pulled out at a high rate of speed and stopped opposite for a few seconds (probably to roll down the window and say “follow me”) which is what the cars did. Young, forbidden love! Ah, the summer time life we don’t care to explain to adults. Been there many times. I’ll bet Dad and Mom saw the secret signal and instant reaction from their driveway just as I did. They are not clueless. Letting it happen must be a bitch for parents.

Frankly Jihadists would be a much more colorful story but I’m betting on young love. It’s that time of the year in Boise. Night time temp is projected to dip to 70F. A wonderful night for cruising and the magic of life. Sunday is not your normal cruising night, so it might be a bomb making terrorist exchange. It could happen! (see my previous post about (un)certainty). No one can tame hormones with statistics

I don’t remember the exact details on my lesson about uncertainty. I do remember the numbers that woke me up. If I did act A with 90% certainty of positive outcome and the then I did act B with a 90% of positive outcome the two acts would have .9 X .9 = .81 (81%) certainty of a positive outcome for doing both A and B. It was a shock to my belief system that the probabilities (always a fraction of 1 or 100%) have to be multiplied.

Think about it. If the chance of me not being arrested for robbing a bank was .50 (50%) and then if I robbed a second back, I’ve got a 25% chance of getting away with both robbery of both #1 #2. That makes sense, right? Eventually the bank robber is caught. Yes, I’m waving my hands past all kinds of details statisticians care to opine about. Probabilities (always between 0 and 1, or 0 to 100%, or impossible and dead certain), they multiply and the result is always lower than either #1 or #2.

What happens if a series of wild ass guess (WAG) is applied for three events. .5 X .5 X .5 = 12.5% chance of them all being correct. Fortunately, religion provides 100% certainty for all three in my example 1 X 1 X 1 = 1. I’m not picking on religion. Might as well be deep liberal or deep conservative principles. People like certainty, despite the evidence that it doesn’t exist. Once probability of any action/prediction drops below 1 (100%) then it’s a slow (or fast) slide toward all future predictions being completely wrong, when viewed in toto.

When the UN IPCC says there’s a 90% (their best guess) chance that the climate is going to fry everyone in a 100 years, the glaciers and ice caps will melt and the sea rising 50 ft. and if it not freezing, it’s burning hot or rain forest or desert. All those predictions, with their own long chains of questionable probabilities. How many are going to come true? When newly observed data resets one probability in the chains to something small like 10%, what happens to the total? It’s called FAIL.

Given their past record, what is the probability of anything useful from the UN. Vanishingly small, IMO.

There are many things I hate. Today it was the ISP/cable company. Oh, it all started like a nice feature but the devil is in the details and I know his name, scent, and big brother leanings.

They want to transition their customers from their mail servers (tragically coupled to Postini) to Google’s gmail. Not a bad idea. Postini sucks, and running your own mail servers sucks even worse. Just ask me: I run a tiny exim4 mail server to smarthost any mail sent from background scripts and such. This is not so benign a change for edge cases (Linux). Oh, I managed to it get to work. I think, but in between the cable modem drop outs, I noticed some other things I don’t like about cableone.net. They intercept the http requests (web page loads). They count your gigabytes of download and upload and they can block/redirect access to a site (like to my puny, puny, 250 hits a day www.mvmanila.com barely used by me or anyone else). That’s probably an error on their part but somehow, I have to fix their zealous over-reaching big brother reach around?

Then again, I can call their tech support at midnight. So I did from my throw away cell phone (sound quality: crap). Eventually I got Nick. Who explained that shit has broken loose all over their phone center about the google switchover email and the big wigs at the puzzle palace don’t tell people at his level how or why his mothership fucked it up or what they are doing or when it’s going to be good. That’s candor and it’s damn refreshing. Can’t hate the guy for telling the truth. I like the truth.

I said “I’m glad I’m not you” and he laughed and laughed. Even on a crap-phone I can make people laugh. (crap-phone is a Dave Barry ™ idiom that may not be registered at the Department of Everything You Can Say)

I watched PBS American Masters, Merle Haggard. Twice. It took me twice because the first time I had to go through my memory bank back when I thought he was just an irrelevant county singer songwriter and then a decade later when I kind of liked his tunes and lyrics. That was the first pass down my memory banks. Plowing the old fields brings up debris. Not all of which I cared to see again, but there we go. The second viewing, I could see and hear what I had misjudged so many decades ago. American Master? Yes.

What can I say? I misjudged him. A lot. My 1970 opinion was wrong in the lens of time. I wonder what other beliefs I formed back then that were never accurate and appear foolish in the lens of time? There is a point where individuals choose to stop learning. They know everything they care to know. It might be age 20 or age 90, but at some point, we don’t want any new information. Particularly, we don’t want information that we were wrong, then or now.

It’s kind of sad but that’s how it works. The last couple of days have a wonderful example of the No Spin Zone at FOX, spinning like mad. Yeah, they admitted tonight to not doing any fact checking about the Sherrod story. They were too busy trying to frame the Tea Party in Fox’s terms and to jump in front of the parade that they couldn’t fact check a freaking blogger. Idiots or Pinheads, you decide. No free pass from me to the other news network, either. They stopped reporting agenda free news long ago. We can safely promote Fox to the same low pedestal as ABC, CBS, NBC (and MSNBC) and CNN. They’ll all equal now!. Fox is a real news network. The National Enquirer (Space Aliens Abducted My Baby) and Rolling Stone are more likely to dig into facts and find the truth than the main stream media (Fox is mainstream, just ask them, they’ll tell you all about it). I guess I can’t stop learning. I can’t trust journalists to keep me informed.

I’m having a bit of a struggle getting mental things back to normal. I had intended to drive north to Port Townsend Wa., last month (June) and I made a lot of plans and preparations, or put off doing things because I wouldn’t be here to follow through. It’s like preparing to hibernate for a week and what you got was insomnia for a month and a half. Nothing seems right now. I’ve got a fog of ennui to sweep away.

The drive north did occur and I got home on 7/15. Ten hours of driving each way along a road I don’t love all that much and it turns out it’s even worse in the summer with the heat and some insane traffic jams from all the other summer travelers.

Back home, one garage door decided to fail while I was gone. I can’t even open it manually so the Jeep is locked in until the door gets repaired by someone who knows about these things. I found a few things that aren’t right and applied my best fix it. Didn’t work. A fail is a FAIL.

On the other hand the Porsche with it’s new tires was a relative joy. Except when the road surface is crap, the traffic too much for the roads available ( *cough* Washington St, *cough*) It seems like Seattle (in all the meanings of the word) has expanded several hundred miles east. Soon it will meet the fellow travelers, failure seeking California and Oregon. Oregon still keeps their rural roads in good great shape but I fear the Blue State disease will get to them too.

What is Blue State Disease, you might ask? It’s a belief system that if they collectively wish hard enough the solution will appear from on high. A Wizard of OZ, Dorothy , click the ruby slippers and it will be OK. Just wish and wish. An oddly religious belief that the left side of the aisle cant see how close their love of mystical magical government is no different that the right hand side’s belief in the return of Christ. Or the mythical magical power of Allah or Jehovah or… If we just wish hard enough, then Green Jobs will appear and we will be saved from certain doom. If we demand technological magic, it will appear. Our hubris is staggering.

It’s almost a hoot to see Fox and CNN try to redefine the Tea Party with their pundit sized sound bites. The left thinks it is a bunch of racists & Christian fundamentalists. The far right thinks its a bunch of “could be fundamentalists” if only they are properly guided. EPIC FAIL on both sides. Keep your religion to yourself, respect the rights of others and adhere to the Constitution (where our rights are enumerated). Stop increasing the deficit with “I wish” wet dreams.

It’s a lonely sad hoot, like two owls in the old growth forest that can’t find a mate, calling into the dark lonely night and no one answers their call. A sad hoot indeed on a slow news weekend.

Long rambling screed ahead.

From what the TV people tell me, the G20 meeting in Montreal was mostly the Socialist EU countries claiming that the world needs to balance their budgets because they ran out of “other peoples” money to spend. Tough times ahead, it’s gonna suck to be there but Free people don’t want to loan them money any longer. Obama would prefer they keep spending freely as he (and GWB) did. Yeah, government spending will solve everything. It’s a delicious irony that the G19 are saying “No. that didn’t work out so well”.

In the local newspaper was a picture of a so called “protester” in Montreal throwing a chair through a plate glass window. Dressed head to toe in black Ninja garb, his face covered in a stocking mask favored by all the big time terrorists (and Ninjas and Ninja Turtles, too). I don’t know what his beef was. Maybe the bank denied him credit or he’s just trashing the building to impress a woman (I’m a loose cannon, babe!). Or maybe he’s protesting against globalism or pushing for it, but only on his enlightened terms. Or he hates Capitalist Symbols. I can’t know.

The fun part is the picture clearly shows a cell phone on his belt. Gray/Grey which just totally ruins the Black Ninja Destroyer look. What? You can’t smash a window without being in constant contact using a Capitalist cell phone? I’ll bet he was waiting for GF to call and tell him what kind of Tofu he should pick up for tonights dinner.

I haven’t said much about the so-called Blacklist of skeptical climate scientists. Why bother? Even for social scientists, it’s butt poor methodology. That it was presented in a National Academy of Sciences journal is the the real problem. NAS hints that only these those White list enlightened folks should make presentations and write assessments for politicians and (one might argue) influence policymakers. NAS does used to have that ability. Now I have put the NAS and anything from the UN into the same place: Political Advocacy groups to lobby for their version of the “ruling class” that knows what is best for you and me.

Post modern, post normal. Are Facts and Science relative to context in which they are presented? It makes sense when looking at the arts. I think Disco was a sad moment in Music and Rap and hip-hop are no better. Millions of people think I’m wrong. There context is bigger than my context. I submit to popular opinion. But, then again the arts evolve to fit their social context (and some would suggest, create that context). I might be correct if I wait.

Manipulating the social context (aka “the message”) is what politicians do. It’s never worked for long in a democracy because those pesky facts control the world. Facts can’t be wished away or new facts wished into existence by the newest context switch. So every few years the context makers get switched out like playlists on your iPod.

You can’t change facts with opinion polls and by refining the “message presentation”. Try it. Wish away the shock you’ll get if you stick a finger in a wall outlet. (actually I think you can stick a finger in a socket if you’re not well grounded, but that kind of makes my point)

Continues to show that Socialism has yet again failed to be implemented properly. Thank God, our US Liberals and Progressives are much smarter. Oh, wait. They have oil and we don’t. Never mind. I am corrected.

“The oil-exporting country is struggling with 30 percent inflation and a deepening recession.”

Let’s follow the yellow brick road, take the left at Pelosi Ave. Turning right to Boehner Blvd (under construction) is a not place I would steer towards. That guy is one scary vindictive “leader in waiting”. Like Nancy was when she wasn’t running the show. Either one just oozes sulfurous evil from my TV set. Can’t I find a better road?